It is estimated that over two million individuals are incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails. In general, inmates that have been convicted of felony offenses serve longer sentences in prisons (e.g., federal or state prisons), whereas inmates that have been convicted of misdemeanors receive shorter sentences that are frequently served in local jails (e.g., county jail). In addition, upon being detained by authorities, an inmate may serve significant periods of time incarcerated in a local jail while awaiting release on bond and, in some cases, while awaiting trial. During all of these periods of incarceration, an inmate may be provided with opportunities to communicate with the outside world.
By allowing inmates to communicate with friends and family while incarcerated, the justice system aims to facilitate their transition back into society upon release. Traditional visitation sessions provided by controlled-environment facilities include telephone calls and in-person visits. More recently, technological advances have allowed controlled-environment facilities to provide residents with various types of remote communications sessions as visitation sessions, including voice and video conferences, text communications, email and online chat sessions.
Providing visitation sessions includes the significant challenge of preventing and detecting unauthorized activity during the visitation sessions. This challenge is made more difficult with the introduction of video visitation sessions in which the participants view each other via live audio and video feeds. The audio portion of a video visitation session may be monitored similarly to audio from traditional voice visitation sessions. For instance, the audio may be monitored live and/or recorded and analyzed to identify various types of unauthorized or suspicious activity, such as identifying keywords of interest or detecting the presence of voices from unauthorized participants.
Video visitations include the additional difficulty of detecting participants passing non-verbal messages via the video feed portion of the visitation session. For instance, during a video visitation session, one of the participants may hold up written notes for the other participant to see and read. The participant may hold up notes that may be typed or handwritten and may be written on surfaces that range from paper notes to notes that are drawn on the hand of a participant. Participants are also able to communicate non-verbally via hand signals and gestures that may range from a sign language to gang signs. In this manner, the participants can communicate silently, thus avoiding detection by audio monitoring tools. In certain scenarios, the non-verbal message need only be displayed long enough for the recipient to capture an image of the displayed message, with the recipient free to review the image in detail at a later time.